Monthly Archives: June 2014

As per the subject line, a quick question for those who read this blog via RSS feed…

I follow 50+ odd blogs, mostly about EVE. Those on WordPress I get e-mails for when they post something new, and for the rest I keep track of new posts via RSSOwl.

I also follow my own blog on RSSOwl – as a form of backup. It is the only WordPress blog I follow that way.

I’ve noticed once a week or more that RSSOwl will think all my posts are new and download the last 10 of them again. This happens outside of when I actually write new posts. Sometimes it might happen a couple of times in a day. Does anyone else have this issue? Is it something specific with my Blog, or a general thing with WordPress RSS?

** Edit – Thanks for the feedback. After some additional Google searches it doesn’t look like it is anything I am able to change or fix. It seems to be the way WP does it RSS, conflicting with the way some readers work. Bugs me a bit though – don’t like the unprofessional image it portrays.

Work has been hellishly busy. I’d like to say this is because of new customers or new projects, but instead it has been fighting fires and fixing mistakes caused by the offshore resources management have decided to use.

I’m barely managing one half reasonable play session a week at the moment.

Last weekend my Low-Sec scout found a useful wormhole to Hi-Sec, so I managed to move in some supplies, a Salvaging Destroyer and Venture between constant interruptions from work and family. This rather piddling result took some 10 hours.

This weekend I’ve been testing a few fits and doing some PVE. I’ve been playing around with a lot of Hawk fits for a while now – and while I have decided on a PVP fit I will leave in Low-Sec, I decided to give up on PVE fits. It is just too slow when compared to the Retribution when working through sites. I also decided on what I would do with the extra high slot on my Viators – which are getting Core Probe Launchers.

I probably shouldn’t be admitting it – but in the earlier years of my EVE playing I would be feeling rather grumpy and frustrated by now at my limited game time. I’d be throwing out “nose off to spite face” comments such as it is pointless to play the game in such circumstances. Now I accept it is not EVE’s fault, and try to appreciate whatever free time I do manage to wrestle from my busy life, and don’t dwell on it. It helps that I don’t have to feel guilt about letting down a Corp.

I was bemused by the Kronos 1.4 patch. The notes on the update were sparse, yet it required a 229MB download.

I was also bemused to see my name mentioned in Amarr local recently. Apparently I was paid out several 100 million ISK by one of the duplication scammers. I had the Window’s helpdesk call me for the 350th time recently, and I asked the person why they were using the same old scam, and couldn’t they come up with something more original each time they called. They just hung up. I wonder the same thing about EVE scams. In the grand scheme of things there isn’t as much variety as there should be.

BB 57 – I am going to paraphrase the topic of the latest blog banter. What can be done to help people who don’t know how to fit their ships, and do veteran players have a responsibility to help them?

There’s a scene in the fourth series of Game of Thrones where Cersei Lannister approaches Gregor Clegane (otherwise known as The Mountain) while he is having some outdoor sparing practice. In this series the character is played by the huge Icelandic strongman Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson. The practice involves a guard thrusting a weapon into the hand of a slave and pushing them towards obvious and inevitable death. None put up a fight of note and The Mountain duly kills them.

When I watched the scene I immediately thought of EVE Online, and the tendency for people to post links to Killmails of poorly fitted ships. They are unremarkable kills that required little skill, little risk, and have a hapless victim. Yet here are the posts – look, look, look at me – here’s an easy kill of someone who hasn’t played the game for long – let me crow and strut and announce to all and sundry my superiority.

The problem is not the poor fit – that is something most people will learn from one way or the other. The problem is the reaction to it.

So what can veteran players do? Well, it seems simple. They can keep their killmail links to themselves. Just send an EVEMail to the pilot saying you noticed their fit was less than optimum, and that if they would like some pointers to some better fits, just ask.

CCP seems to have been uncharacteristically quiet on the Dev Blog and Forum front since Kronos was released. CCP karkur alluded to the distraction around the retrenchments having an impact on scheduled tasks which is not surprising. A consequence of this lull seemed to be an increase in the philosophical bent in the topics of some EVE bloggers.

I wasn’t able to play since last weekend, and this weekend’s free time was limited. I really should have done something concrete in game, but I resorted to hauling and tinkering with fits again. I was in need of that intangible but worthwhile mindless distraction.

I completed my move from my old home into my new one, shifting some 60B ISK in assets without incident. (I did have a moment where a black skulled flashy pilot turned up in a destroyer on a gate as I jumped into a system. While he paid me no attention, it was a reminder of the underlying risk I was taking in moving everything.)

I never auto pilot in a blockade runner, just in case someone takes a gamble on me carrying something of worth in my cargo hold. If someone noticed my frequent travels and ganked me going in the right direction this weekend, they’d have had a chance at a 2 to 3B ISK drop.

My Alliance only has one active blue standing at the moment – to a Corp in my old home. We have mutual 0% tax on our POCO, a suggestion we would be willing to help each other defend them, and an open offer to share Orca boosts. We don’t chat often, but we certainly see each other daily. (Just between you and me, the fact they regularly strip the belts clear was one of the reasons I moved!) Their CEO remarked that they would be sad to see me around less. A reminder that even when you play solo, you can be a familiar part of other people’s game.

I am pleased with the new home system though. Being closer to Amarr and Jita makes it much more viable just to grab something off the market to either try building something new or trying out a new fit. It is also quieter, so will be easier to do some mining when I feel inclined.

I also spent some time working out the cost to attend EveDownUnder 2014 in Sydney this November. While I like the idea of going, it would really put me out of my comfort zone. It is the sort of thing I could easily end up regretting the effort and expense of doing. I’m not suggesting the event won’t be worthwhile – I just don’t know if I could push myself out of my comfort zone enough to make the most of it. (As I remark occasionally, I’m a Hermit for a reason.)

I mentioned it to my wife and she was really keen for me to attend. Overly keen actually. While she is prone to being genuinely nice at times, my suspicions were confirmed the following day when she dropped a comment on how she’d be planning for some trip away for herself in return. That ups the ante significantly, as not only do I have to worry about enjoying it, I then also have to worry about how much it will cost me afterwards. I’m not sure how it is for other husbands, but in these sorts of deals I usually seem to end up being well behind. (I remember one such deal where I got something so small and insignificant I couldn’t tell you what it was – and my wife got a trip to Japan for a week to visit a friend.) I think I’ve talked myself out of it.

I was home a day earlier than expected on the weekend due to heavy rain closing roads in an area I had planned to visit. Since my wife had assumed I wouldn’t be around she had already organised a social outing with the kids that I wasn’t expected to attend. I found myself home alone with no plans. How fortuitous!

I spent a lot of time playing EVE. I don’t have anything in particular of note to write about – I just wanted something mind-numbing and relaxing to do, so continued the process of moving my various Alts into the new home base. Shuffling so many characters, clones and various assets about gets complicated – trying to ensure I was storing the right ships with the right clones in the right stations.

Again I was thinking there is no way I could sell this process to another gamer as fun – but I found it an agreeable distraction.

In the grand scheme of things Kronos seems to have gone in rather smoothly. Post update patching has been minimal and generally the loudest complaints have been about balance changes. They were not however really pushing boundaries with what they were doing. The Crius update might be different.

By now I think a lot of people will have noticed this little tidbit of information:

Maybe in the next few months we will see something in place for the removal of offline control towers. That could be very interesting, and frankly with the approaching ability to anchor POS anywhere without standings, it will be needed.

There are a couple of articles doing the rounds about CCP and more retrenchments. If you are already in a poor head space about EVE and CCP and don’t want to feel any worse, you should probably ignore them.

The first has quotes from an unnamed source/s, an annoyed past employee, and reads a little like they have an agenda as opposed to reporting just the facts.

In summary, the (apparent) final phase of the already announced restructuring and retrenchments at CCP are occurring now, and the management of the development of the World of Darkness MMO lacked cohesive direction.

Reading the articles did make me stop for a moment and think about where EVE is at.

. There is steady and constant improvement to the game

. There are fixes to the current game to look forward to

. There are new features and content to look forward to

. The development of EVE doesn’t seem to be particularly dysfunctional

At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I’m not particularly worried at the moment about the game EVE.

It does however put me in the sphere of a pet topic of mine. For the last 20 years I’ve been working for Consulting Companies – providing mostly remote support for the IT infrastructure (databases and ERP software) of clients. I have had extended dealings with more than 80 organisations – from Local Governments to the smallest Mining company to the largest Retail conglomerates in my country. (By extended I mean frequent contact for anywhere between 6 months and a decade). Out of all those organisations, and the companies I have worked for, there have only been 3 or 4 I have thought were actually managed and run well. Many more of the companies were successful – but I would not have attributed senior management as the key reason for that.

I am not actually suggesting I could do any better – but there seems in my mind something wrong with the corporate culture and effectiveness at the most senior levels.

That does not excuse CCP for its habit of stumbling and making mistakes – or the fact that you don’t really seem to hear about the senior managers being highlighted as failing and suffering any appropriate consequence. In my mind however it isn’t really just a problem with CCP, or the Game industry in general. It is probably much wider than that.

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